Backstory:
I finally got sick of seeing anti-Q rhetoric being nothing but character attacks, goalpost-moving, and strawmen, so I finally asked someone against Q that I previously respected to defend his position. This is the abortion of a comment he provided, and I promptly destroyed it so badly that he backpedaled and unbelievably claimed it was the wrong video - after pointing me to exact times of what I should watch.
Worse, still, for the anti-Q argument, I provided to him a set of text/images that he could easily debunk if fake, and despite being raked through the coals until there was nothing left, he still hasn't even attempted to do so.
Challenge:
Present your case better than he did. Either defend your position with facts, evidence, and if a video, timestamps to the relevant parts, OR debunk these. Or even some small number of them. Even one is a better start than the aforementioned user had.
Anyone that has known me for any length of time on this site knows that I follow the evidence, and will flip on a dime if I find my position untenable. This is the place to cause that to happen.
TL;DR:
Either prove your position that Q is a LARP, or debunk these.
Promise:
If nobody manages to even cast a non-trivial amount of shade on Q, I will spend my time here demolishing everyone that dismissively mocks Q as a LARP.
If, however, you can convince me Q is a LARP, I will use your arguments to mock those that still believe in Q.
Good luck.
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SoberSecondThought ago
Okay, let's do this. I'll have to break it into chunks as there is so much to cover.
If anyone needs to read Q in the original: https://qanonposts.com/
My Position Hasn't Changed Since Q Started
First, let me just remind you of this post that I made back in November. You posted a reply to it at the time, but as it was long and contained a lot of links, you might not have read all of it.
It lays out my assessment of Q at that point, which was that Q was just a continuation of all the other phony insider personas that he had been running for months previously (HighLevelInsider, WisconsinIsCorrupt, Senate Anon, and so on). Nothing I have seen in the ensuing seven months has changed my mind about that (although I do have some further thoughts about his motive which I will share later).
The Highly Suspicious Timing
Next, I want you to confirm the timing of a couple of things. I started my investigative series on October 24th, when I called out HighLevelInsider as a disinfo shill working for David Brock. I posted follow-ups on the 25th and 26th, giving more details about how he is connected to David Brock and how he misdirects people.
Then on the 27th, I humiliated HLI by proving that he was using ababcd to shill for his other big persona, Senate Anon. This is important, so please read that submission as well. I linked HLI to Senate Anon, and linked both of them to ababcd. I showed that their main method of shilling was by misrepresenting existing information developed by Voaters or /b/tards as if it was "insider" info that came from them. This was a very bad moment for HLI/Senate Anon. It was 2:46 pm Voat time, which is 10:46 am EST, on the 27th. At the end I promised "much more information" in future submissions.
There were 137 responses to that day's submission. Lots of traffic, thousands of people viewing it. The responses to and from WisconsinIsCorrupt were especially important because HLI and Senate Anon never showed up to defend themselves, and I had denounced WIC as another of his personas. Early in the morning on the 28th, it was becoming clear that I was getting more support than WIC was.
The very first post by Q appeared on 4chan at 2:33 pm EST on the afternoon of the 28th, saying Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested. Two more appeared that evening, adding that she might flee, that there would be massive riots and martial law, and that the National Guard was being activated, plus a bunch of vague hints that can be explained as part of his "cold reading" method. None of his specific claims were true. But they were unusually direct and clear by the later standards of Q, and had the useful effect of diverting attention away from Voat and anything I might be saying there. Later the excuse was devised that sometimes Q "posts disinformation," which conveniently explains all the countless times that he posted lies and garbage. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
My next submission was the following day, the 29th, at 7:30 am EST. Again, 122 comments and even more traffic than to the previous one. Q stepped up the pace with eleven posts to 4chan (two just after midnight), but again, it was all either leading questions, or stuff that was already publicly known. He mentioned Pelosi's net worth, her memory problems, Obama having a fake email address to correspond with Hillary on her server, all stuff that was already in the public domain. He noted that Mike Rogers had been allowed to stay on at NSA; this wouldn't raise any eyebrows because Rogers had made a very public demonstration of support for Trump, flying to New York to meet him right after the election. I thought at the time that Rogers was turning on the Deep State, and so did lots of people, and so him staying made sense. But as it turned out, Rogers was NOT going to stay on at NSA much longer; he was replaced by Paul Nakasone in May 2018. Nobody has called Q on this. If it's disinformation, who did it disinform? It's not. It's him tossing out random crap that everyone knows as if it was top secret. Q even asked a few questions about Hillary, like how much of Haiti disaster relief money went to her, but here again, he wasn't betraying any secrets, just asking questions that had been out there for months or years.
He Was In Serious Trouble Once I Showed His Face
The exact sequence of events is especially important here, because my submission on the 30th at 6:45 pm EST linked to video of HLI/Senate Anon, in his YouTube persona of "Tory Smith". I outed the guy.
Okay. Now if I was mistaken about "Tory Smith," then presumably HLI/Senate Anon wouldn't have cared. He'd have relaxed a bit once I got something wrong. But I think he cared a great deal, because he went back to 4chan and starting at 11:00 pm on the 31st he promised that Podesta would be indicted Nov 3rd, and Huma on Nov 6th. Again, totally wrong, but what is particularly interesting about that is that he had implied just a few posts previously that Huma was cooperating. "Husband in jail. What would you do?"
He also returned to an esoteric theme that he had spent a lot of time on as HighLevelInsider, talking for the first time about Satan and evil and the "four families" that rule everything. He has gone back to that a lot. And he threw in some technobabble about how shills were using a "5 prong pre packaged injection" of sliding posts. This is a particularly interesting claim, because you can Google that string of words and discover that it has never appeared anywhere except in his 4chan post. There are 70 hits and every last one is just another copy of him saying it.
As I have said from the beginning, this performance did not fool me even slightly. I have been reading this guy's crap for the past year and a half. He just doesn't have that much imagination, and he hasn't been given a lot of resources beyond his imagination. He was firing shotgun blasts of old stuff from previous characters he had played, just to see what got attention, and then playing up to that.
From that point on, he played the Q character every day, multiple posts per day. After a few weeks, he gave up on his last remaining "insider" persona on Voat, WisconsinIsCorrupt. He was committed to Q, and has not been able to "dismount the tiger" since, because at all costs he has had to keep diverting attention away from my investigative series.
Frankly, I find it goddamned amazing how this story has unfolded. Today's barrage of mainstream media coverage of Q is surreal to me. It is hard to believe that so much could happen as a result of me and my little investigative project. However, that was my only possible conclusion last November and I see no reason to alter it now. I will start going through all the phony "proofs" in my next post.
Crensch ago
Analyzing your first link:
I don't recall any of that, but it looks like I read enough... not that it would have taken much with ESOTERIC on the other side. His being on the other side lends a lot of credibility to your side. Not that I wouldn't have verified at least some of your words, but that's likely the situation.
In that link you claim this:
and
And without explaining why or how, you jump to this:
And still without any support or explanation:
So when you say this:
I don't really care at this point. I'm looking for the support for the claims that HLI is even relevant, much less in it with DB and the source of Q.
So I'll go back above to a bunch of what appeared to be wordsalad to see if you presented anything at all to explain this situation.
... none. http://archive.is/tZ7eW
Just claims of sockpuppet accounts and other "x anon" that you claim came from them. At no point do you make any link to Q anon. The argument at this point, and this is generously giving you the benefit of the doubt with the other anons being from them, that HLI and DB created other anons, therefore Q anon was also created by them.
That's your argument at best.
So, back to where we were:
No link to the tweet, but let me help you with that.
Her tweet: "Mueller is Trump staff?"
And she's responding to: "Ryan on Trump/Sessions, whether he's concerned Mueller will be removed: "Look, the president gets to decide what his personnel is."" from Matt Flegenheimer.
That doesn't match with what you're claiming here.
I'm not going to let you get away with claims like that when you provide no evidence that your words are truthful, and what I DO find on that same day about it is her asking a question about another guy talking about what Ryan said.
Still no evidence or even glimmer of support for this claim.
You're right, I must not have read everything, just what was relevant to you and ESOTERIC. The rest was uninteresting and long-winded storytelling. I regret calling your arguments cogent and valid, but maybe everything not related to Q that I saw was. Still inexcusable on my part.
And there is where I'll stop with your first link.
dooob ago
Thank you for taking your time to discuss this low-info person who does his best to appear like a gatekeeper to the truth. You missed something among the first paragraphs. The qanonpost link he links to mimics qanon.pub style but lacks answers on solved drops and instead of the about button there is a donation button.
SoberSecondThought ago
Okay, I can see where this is going.
In the submission that we are discussing, the first paragraph explains that this is the most recent (the 12th) in a series, and where to find all the previous parts. My point was to draw your attention to the fact that you came in on the LAST of my 12 submissions, and didn't read all of it. While you're certainly not obliged to read the previous 11 submissions, it's cavalier of you to then dismiss what I say about HLI or David Brock as being unsupported.
For example, the reasons why I specifically call out David Brock and Media Matters as being the ones organizing and funding the cover-up executed by HLI are given in two long submissions. In the first, I explained why Media Matters, the largest of Brock's various propaganda operations, is best suited to handling a covert disinfo project, and I drew upon the work of ActivistFacts to show that MM had in fact lied to the IRS about a large chunk of its revenue -- large enough to pay for a covert disinfo project. In the second, I drew upon the work of Wikileaks and the Washington Free Beacon to narrow down where that chunk of revenue originally came from. I showed that it could not be foundation money, as the accounting rules for such money are too tight. It had to be a personal donation. I showed that Herb Sandler, famous from the 'handkerchief' email, made a large personal donation to MM, and using emails from the Podesta dump, I showed that Sandler met with Brock after checking with John Podesta about whether he should.
This is solid investigation, the result of more than a year of work. I realize that you didn't read it at the time, and I don't insist that you read everything now. (Counting long replies in the comments it probably comes to more than 40,000 words by now.) But I reject the charge that my statements are unsupported.
Crensch ago
You drew my attention to a massive amount of backstory without taking the steps to get me on board with your claims. Irritating.
I'm currently assessing the text below that link, and for some of it, you have a point. Some of it doesn't add up, and I'm clawing through links and pages of comments and submissions.
All of this is meaningless. "they had the funds"
Link me to those submissions. I'm working with the links you give me in order because I don't do that anachronistic crap because it's dishonest Jewish bullshit to hide lies in the fine print.
Nobody gives a flying fuck about this at the moment. Nobody.
Your job is to provide me with your supporting arguments without me having to go through 40,000 words because literally anyone knows that 99.9999999% of the people you come across won't trawl through it. If you don't know something well enough to state it in a few paragraphs, then maybe you shouldn't try to explain it to people.
I get that you've put a fuckton of effort into this, but even with my completely insane ability to parse a TON of text and information and crush it down into useful little diamonds, I'm having trouble because your arguments meander so goddamn much, and you spend so much time patting yourself on the back and acting like everyone SHOULD have read your 40,000 words.
Do you know what I would do in your situation?
-Claim-
--Supporting links and arguments--
-Claim-
--Supporting linnks and arguments--
Yes. I'd cut out 39,000 words or more of MY work in order to give people digestible information that if they choose to, they can go check my work over. All I've seen so far is a fucking story and a LOT of disparate information that I'm having to try to pull together in order to understand this myself, and that's a far cry from where it needs to be for others reading this to understand it.
If the only way you can present your information is a long-winded story, all I can say is that you'll have very few that really read it all, and fewer still that think you're not using ghostwritingshill tactics.
Fuck me, I need a break. I'm not saying you're 100% full of shit, but you write like someone who is, and it's exhausting.
@kevdude @Vindicator @heygeorge @xenoPsychologist @Rainy-Day-Dream
If any of y'all want to try and parse any of this guy's post(s), I'd appreciate the second pair of eyes on it. I'm almost certain this guy has mastered the "baffle with bullshit" but I'm not ready to throw in the towel completely yet. You might not agree with my position on Q, but this guy has falsifiable comments and submissions that I'd appreciate any kind of input on.
As of this moment, I've not confirmed that what he says about David Brock being behind HLI-> WIC -> Q, or that any of those entities are linked, though the active times of all of them are really close together, and the overall idea "insider info" is the same between them.
Analyzing his comment in this thread
Analyzing the first link in his comment
Vindicator ago
As I recall, I found some of Sober's initial work about Brock and a few of our local disinfo-pushers cogent and worth considering. But then he started conflating many very different people into his theory -- people with completely unique contribution styles who had demonstrated a very un-shillish quality of engagement in the community. In one particularly weakly supported post, he asserted that @think- and @ESOTERICshade were the same person, for example. At that point, I started to think the disinfo had gotten the better of him and he'd lost his ability to discern.
While I think his point about Q and "cold reading" is worth considering, his Q hypothesis was the last in a very long line of identity conflations he made, which I already found unconvincing.
His post today in this thread confirms my previous sense. He asserts that Q "Was In Serious Trouble Once I Showed His Face". In his mind, his posts here on Voat have derailed the entire Brock organization:
!
@SoberSecondThought, I am now of the mind that either you are some poor dude who has totally lost perspective and need a serious break from this stuff because this sounds frighteningly close to mental illness to me, or you yourself are paid to be here, submitting these long-winded threads to waste people's time, discredit those you target, and confuse people if possible.
think- ago
Didn't he even allege at some point that I am 'Q'? roflmao
SoberSecondThought ago
Not going to argue with you, as there's not much to be gained from it. There's so much cognitive dissonance at this point regarding Q that evidence for my position is going to sound to you and @Crensch and a lot of other people like evidence against it. There's a hurricane of Q-fervor out there now.
I'll just say this: One day you will hear, from a trustworthy source other than me, that the Glenn Beck whistleblower episode was where this started. Some brave soul tried to tell us about Pizzagate three years before Pizzagate was a word. You will hear that Mike Pence and Paul Ryan were involved, and that because of their involvement, they were subject to relentless preemptive character attacks online.
All I did was figure that out and follow the clues here. I'm not a narcissist or someone mentally ill. I saw that it was a story that needed exposing. But now Glenn Beck, Mike Pence, and Paul Ryan (and the country) are clearly going to be just fine, they don't need any further help from me. I felt like I owed to you and @Crensch, as mods, to try and get you on board. But you'll also be fine either way.
Vindicator ago
SST, it's kind of arrogant to assume that everyone but you is brainwashed into Qlove. Many of us are skeptics, even though we believe Q is who he purports to be. Also, are you aware you are repeating the MSM talking point lingo? It doesn't help your argument.
Your Glenn Beck material was quite interesting, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out Pedocrat horrors and blackmail are the explanation for Beck's fall. But you need to read what you wrote out loud to yourself and listen to how it sounds. It sounds a lot like WisconsinIsCorrupt used to sound. ! Then you need to go on a month long fishing trip and listen to the wind in the trees.
SoberSecondThought ago
It's deliciously ironic, is what it is. I don't think everyone is brainwashed. I think everyone has their own filter, and based on their premises, almost everyone is right.
The more casual normies get as far as Q's first couple of days. They see that he predicted Hillary would be arrested, that there would be martial law, that Obama had supposedly gone to North Korea, and so on, and they shrug. Okay, that's wrong so he's not who he says he is. They are right about Q being unreliable, and that's just as far as they get.
The more analytical normies get a little further. They've watched InfoWars, they know about Operation Mockingbird, they're prepared to accept a little bit of disinformation, but they balk at all that "future predicts the past" bullshit. Like when he makes a post saying "Blunt and Direct Time" about Adam Schiff being a leaker ... then the next day a Bangladeshi terrorist blows up a pipe bomb, so now what he was REALLY talking about was a prediction that the FBI would let this guy set off his ineffective pipe bomb. Because BDT is the currency code for Bangladesh. And that's where the more analytical normies jump ship, because it's such blatant confirmation bias to believe Q when he claims things like that.
The third level is the somewhat red-pilled dude who can see that the Dems are incredibly corrupt, that they screwed Bernie, that there's something really, really awful going on behind the scenes. He doesn't do a ton of research, he's not a /b/tard or an InfoWars viewer, he just doesn't trust anyone. His argument is that Q has to be about something because so much effort goes into it and so many people pay attention to it. He doesn't care if Q is who he claims to be. It doesn't matter. What matters is that Q is a symptom of lies and manipulation reaching an epic level. And he's right too.
The fourth level is the red-pilled veteran of 4chan and Voat who knows all the lore. He knows about Bigfish finding the child porn files on the Comet Pizza server. He knows about Ryan O'Neal getting harassed by James Alefantis for his video about the Pegasus museum. And most of all, he knows about the 45,000 sealed items. So he is pretty darn sure that there is going to be a reckoning soon. He doesn't really care if Q is real or not. Q isn't the proof of anything important for him. I actually think of you and @Crensch as being in that category. I don't think Q has fooled you in any fundamental way, beyond operating a bunch of sockpuppets. And they don't matter very much at this point.
My peculiar position is that I saw the connection between some widely spaced events, and I used that insight to trap HLI/WIC/etc into making some revealing mistakes. On the day of my first submission, before I had said anything about "Tory Smith," he used one of his dormant alts to slide my post with two posts about "Galactics" and "blue avians". Now, I can't prove to you that it wasn't one of MY alts that did that. But I had spent months understanding the Glenn Beck story, and researching why Senate Anon insisted that Paul Ryan and Mike Pence were both traitors. I knew right then that he had blundered. He had used language from one of his characters out of context.
What you have to understand is that even if none of you saw the mistake, I made sure that he did. Even if nobody else believed me, he knew I had him. He knew that I knew that he was "Tory Smith". I could get all sorts of little details wrong, make a bad call about a particular sockpuppet, and all the same I was a huge danger because he actually is "Tory Smith" and he worked with Alexandra Meadors who used her real name. There is a paper trial a mile wide leading to him.
And that fact exerted huge pressure on him. He couldn't be sure if people would believe me, or what else I might reveal. So he had to create a really powerful distraction, and at this stage of the game, the only distraction that would work would be one that played to the truth. There really is a storm coming. He's not lying about that. He has to make up predictions out of nothing, new exciting drama every day, and so it's clear he's faking if you pay attention. But he makes the predictions and claims fit the overall situation. He's an insider in that sense. He knows what to say, just like you or I would know more or less what to say if we had to LARP in that way.
So when I say that I know something nobody else knows, it's not because I'm a narcissist or mentally ill. It's just in the nature of the investigation. I do this kind of thing professionally, hunt down identity frauds and financial frauds online. (I said that once before, early on, I think when srayzie asked me about my background.) I'm good at it. I work with some of the smartest people in that field. But I know the limits of the technique. It's not easy to sift through a blizzard of clues. And I've known from the start that I wouldn't convince most people.
That's okay. I don't take it personally when you don't believe me. Your truth is (let's say) 90 percent of the whole truth, and my truth is 93 percent.
Crensch ago
Delusions of grandeur. This guy is toast.
@Vindicator
ESOTERICshade ago
Bro, I think you summed it up right there. I agree.